Story Highlights

On March 2, director Steve McQueen could be clutching a handful of Oscars for 12 Years a Slave, his searing film about a free black man kidnapped into slavery before the Civil War.

And he's equally excited that his best-picture nominee has helped make Solomon Northup's memoir — the basis for the film — a best-selling book. Now the British filmmaker is working with Penguin Books to encourage secondary schools to teach Northrup's narrative, first published in 1853.

"This story is so important. It was lost for 150 years. How is that possible?" asks McQueen, who's nominated for best director. "I'm just so happy that the public has embraced the movie and the book."

12 Years a Slave is No. 14 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, sitting in the top 20 with other movie tie-in editions including Divergent, The Monuments Men and The Book Thief.

But those are contemporary titles, some already huge best sellers before a movie version was even in the works. 12 Years a Slave has come out of virtual obscurity to climb best-seller lists.

Interestingly, the book sold well in its own time. In surprisingly accessible prose for a 19th-century narrative, Northup describes how he was lured from New York to Washington in 1841 and then sold into slavery. He endured horrific conditions on Louisiana plantations until he was saved by friends from the north. For whatever reason, 12 Years a Slave, unlike Frederick Douglass's classic slave narrative, seemed to fade into history.

"This is a book nobody was really aware of, except scholars in the field, which is being introduced to the country," says John Siciliano, executive editor of Penguin Books, publisher of the movie tie-in paperback (it features star Chiwetel Ejiofor on the jacket).

Movie tie-in cover for '12 Years a Slave'(Photo: -)

Siciliano says Penguin has sold more than 150,000 copies both digitally and in print. (Adding to overall sales: the book is in the public domain, so there are low-priced versions of the e-book available from different publishers. Various print versions also are available.)

Penguin first published 12 Years in 2012, with a different jacket, as part of its African-American Classics series. Then Siciliano was surprised by a call from Brad Pitt's Plan B production company, with news of a forthcoming movie adaptation.

Penguin released the movie tie-in paperback in September 2013, with a first printing of 30,000 copies, and a new foreword by McQueen.

Ever since the movie nabbed nine Oscar nominations, Penguin has seen "huge reorders from bookstores" and new orders from mass retailers including Target and Costco, Siciliano says.

Now Penguin is working with McQueen and Plan B to reach out to secondary schools and curriculum developers across the USA (and in Britain) "to put the book in their hands," says Siciliano. Penguin has commissioned a teachers' guide, to be ready in March.

McQueen likens Northup's book to Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, the seminal Holocaust memoir read by generations of schoolchildren.

"I live in Amsterdam and Anne Frank is all around us," says McQueen, who read Frank's diary when he was about 14 in school in London. Northup's story, he says, will appeal to kids because "it's so accessible, it's readable, it's so engaging. Solomon, like Anne Frank, is talking directly to us."

At least two teachers who have taught 12 Years a Slave recently agree it belongs in secondary schools.

"I do think it's an awesome book for 11th graders, even 12th graders," says Anne Kauth, who teaches literature at Saratoga Springs High School in Saratoga, N.Y., where Northup lived before he was kidnapped.

Last year, several of Kauth's seniors read the book for a group project. Kauth says she "wanted students to learn more about the north and slavery, about some of the awful stuff that was going on here."

In the south, the book also is being read by high school students. Aisha Booth-Horton, a social studies teacher at the Quality Education school, an African-American-owned charter school in Winston-Salem, N.C., introduced it to her 11th graders last fall. They were studying slavery as part of American history.

She says at first students were angry at what Solomon endured, but she encouraged them to see the positives in his fight for freedom.

Soon, she says, they were "creating a 21st century version of Solomon," seeing him as "part President Obama, a little bit Mandela, and some Muhammad Ali."

Booth-Horton, who is African-American, says the book is "controversial" and "hard," but should be taught in schools. She thinks the Penguin teachers' guide is important.

"Any hard story should be told," she says, "but told under guided hands."